


The Kids Are Alright

by ignipes



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-31
Updated: 2006-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:24:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes





	The Kids Are Alright

She asks him, once, how he got into this life.

It's after four a.m. and the bar is empty. The chairs are up, the floor is swept, and Jo's gone to bed. Ellen checks the lock on the front door and starts switching off the lights.

"You been sittin' there all night," Ellen says, crossing the room slowly and leaning against the table in the corner.

Ash doesn't even look up. The glow from the laptop lights his face, makes him look even paler than usual, and he just shakes his head absently and replies, "Nah, I'm fine."

Ellen leans down to see what he's reading. _Journal of Engineering Mechanics_. She doesn't even know half the words in the title of the article on screen. "Well, that looks like a barrel of laughs."

He looks up like he's going to say something, tell her what problem he's working on or what contraption he's going to build out of the old washing machine, three broken TVs, and busted freezer she's got out back, but his expression changes quickly and he grins, a little sheepish, and lifts his empty beer bottle. "Hey, you know knowledge is power."

"So I've been told." Ellen takes the empty bottle from him and turns toward the bar, thinks better of it. "That's what I don't get about you, kiddo."

Ash's smile looks a little forced now. "What's that?"

"You should be out there building rockets or curing cancer or figuring out the grand unified theory of… something," Ellen says, rolling the beer bottle between her hands. "What the hell are you doing here?"

He shrugs his skinny shoulders. "There's weird shit out there."

~

Billy Tepper brought him by one morning. Pulled up in that rattletrap old Ford, pounded on the door till Ellen finally heard it in the back room, jerked his three-fingered right hand toward the bed of his truck and said, "Dumbass green kid needs stitches."

"Take him to a hospital," Ellen snapped, shoving the door shut. Trouble with being a woman in a man's world was that none of the bastards believed her when she tried to tell them she was about as good a nurse as Mildred Ratched.

Billy jammed his foot in the door to stop her. "I ain't got time for this shit."

"I ain't a fucking babysitter," Ellen countered.

"The little punk won't even tell me his name." Billy said it like it was a personal insult, lips turned down at the corners and brow furrowed in comical confusion.

Ellen decided that anybody who could make Billy Tepper pout like a scolded brat couldn't be all bad. She pulled the door open and sighed. "Fine, but you owe me one."

She never let Billy Tepper drink on credit again, but she did stitch up the dumbass green kid and let him sleep off a concussion on one of the beds in the back.

A few weeks later, he was still kinda hanging around, but he rigged the TV to pick up free cable, fixed the roadhouse sign that had been burned out for two years, installed an alarm system on the cellar to keep the liquor safe from wandering customers, and spent two hours one Saturday helping Jo study for a math test. Ellen figured there were worse strays that could've been dumped on her doorstep that warm spring morning. At least he didn't bite.

~

"Most folks," Ellen says, "spend their wholes live pretending that weird shit doesn't exist."

"Most folks don't grow up in Florida," Ash replies. "We used to live next door to this old guy, I'd mow his lawn for cash, he had the paw of a skunk ape mounted up in his living room. I used to charge the neighbor kids five bucks and let them in to see." Ash smiles at the memory, looking more than a little proud of his youthful business dealings. "The old guy said he killed it himself. "

"He was a hunter?"

"Hell no." Ash snorts and shakes his head. "He got it at a yard sale."

~

Folks tended to misjudge Ash when they first met him. Folks like the Hathaways, married couple, easterners who were new to the game and a pair of arrogant pissants besides. He used to be an investment banker, she used to be a shrink, but Ellen couldn't really hold that against them; everybody who ended up hunting had their own reasons.

What she could hold against them was the cost of two chairs, a mirror, and a red neon Coors Light sign that they added to their tab one night as a result of one of those errors of judgment.

Ellen had been in the back, cleaning up the mess Harlan Bean left when he tried to set his own broken arm in the bathroom and ended up passing out cold and splitting his head open on the toilet. She heard the ruckus up front but didn't make any great haste getting there; a night without a scuffle in the roadhouse would be the night the zombie apocalypse had finally claimed the last of her clientele.

When she heard breaking glass she moved a bit faster, came into the bar to find Mr. Hathaway flat on his back on the floor, overturned table to one side and beer soaking into his green polo shirt. Ash was standing over him, three sheets to the wind but not falling over yet, broken ladder-back chair in one hand and beer bottle in the other.

"I _ain't_ a drop-out," Ash said, righteously indignant, like Hathaway had just insulted his sister, mother, and sweet churchgoing grandmother all in one breath -- which, knowing Hathway, wasn't that farfetched. "I was asked to leave."

Ash raised the remains of the chair. He was swaying a little too much to make it look really menacing, but Hathaway whimpered pathetically and his wife started cussing like a two-dollar whore, struggling to get free of Dave's iron grip.

"What'd I miss?" Ellen asked, her voice low. She hated coming in too late to enjoy the juicy parts of the evening.

Jo was leaning against the bar next to old George Harig, her elbows up and a smile on her face. "Not much," she said. "He's doing alright. He's just fired up because--"

Ash swung the chair down, missing Hathaway's head by inches and breaking the last leg clean off. "For _fighting_," he said, "and I wasn't fightin' frat boys. Least not the human kind." He stepped over Hathaway, accidentally-on-purpose stomping on his hand, and sat down at the table in the corner again.

Dave let go of Mrs. Hathaway, but nobody moved to help her drag her husband to his feet.

Jo held out her hand to old George. He grumbled and dug into his pocket for a tattered twenty, but he was smiling as he did it. Old George had gotten half his face ripped off by a werewolf back in '82 and a nasty fall in an abandoned factory had left his shoulders twisted like a hunchback and one of his legs two inches shorter than the other. They said he was a looker back in the day, but he was a fright to look at now and Ellen figured Jo was the only pretty girl who ever looked him in his one eye anymore without flinching.

"Little lady, I think you got unfair inside information here."

"Pay up, sucker," Jo replied, grinning broadly.

George chuckled and handed over the cash.

Ellen went around the back of the bar to get a broom and dustpan. "You should know better than to bet against the house, George. Especially this house."

He shook his head and lifted his bottle with an unsteady hand, but he didn't argue.

~

She takes her time switching off the rest of the lights and signs, chasing neon red and blue from the room until the only light left is the sickly blue-gray from Ash's laptop and the dim yellow glow from the hallway in the back.

"You gotta bed, boy," Ellen says. "Why don't you trying using it?"

For a second he looks like he's going to argue, but he just snaps the computer shut and pushes his chair back. "If you say so, boss."

"And tomorrow," Ellen adds, though she knows he doesn't need the reminder, "don't you forget to take a look at that pile of junk the professor left yesterday. He'll be back on Saturday and you know how he gets when his EMF is on the fritz."

"Dude should learn how to fix it himself," Ash says, his voice fading as he heads down the hall. "Night, Ellen."

Ellen waits until she hears his door click shut. She swipes at the table in the corner with a damp rag, sets the chair up on top, goes and checks the lock on the door again. Her husband used to tease her about that -- _you already checked twice already, you think it's unlocked itself while you weren't looking?_ \-- but after Jo was born he started doing the same thing, and it was her turn to tease.

In the hall she pauses with her hand on the light switch.

_Locks are only steel and wood_, she remembers him saying, _but they're better than nothing._

Ellen turns off the light and leaves the bar in quiet darkness.


End file.
